Thread: Readers caring about characters

How important is this to the success of a story? Can a story have characters that undergo no development and still be successful?

No.

I would leave it at that but one-word posts are frowned upon, and rightly so.

You can have a pencil sketch of a setting and little or no plot, but if you have strong, believable characters, you can succeed.

Consider 'Our Town' by Thornton Wilder. It's a stage play with no visible setting. The plot is 'how people lived in a small New England town in the early 20th century.' But the people on the stage are real people who develop in a natural way before our eyes, and the development is not driven by some complex plot, but by natural human relationships that are universal.

On the other hand you can have an elaborately drawn setting and a carefully outlined plot, but if your characters are cardboard cut-outs you have nothing. The majority of the science fiction and fantasy literature that I have tried to read are of such - all setting and plot and no one I can believe to be a real character in sight. Then along comes Tolkien, who does it all and does it all properly. Elaborate sets, well developed plots, and well developed characters as well.

So, to answer your question, no. Flat characters lead to a closed book and a search for something else to read.

Well I think that it's the characters which make the story, so they have to have an element of emotion in order for them to move through the story. If the reader doesn't relate to the people in the story, they're unlikely to stick with it.

In response to your question about development, how can the characters not develop as the story moves? If the character doesn't change and grow, neither does the story.

I scribbled this just a minute ago. It’s an attempt to move the story along with minimal character development.

Thirty minutes into the one-hour flight, the engine coughed, spluttered a few times, and died. The propeller turned idly in the wind. It was then Bill noticed the main fuel gauge. It showed empty. So that was what the smell had been. A ruptured fuel line had emptied his main fuel tank. He checked the gauge for the reserve tank, which he knew had not been topped up that morning. There was sufficient for perhaps fifteen minutes flying. With no closer landing fields, one possibility remained. He could restart the engine then use a combination of powered flight and gliding with the engine feathered, to reach his destination. The Squirrel P-38 had good glide capabilities. It would get him there.

There's some movement there, but not much. I'm not sure how it's relevant to the discussion.

In a short story, you can get away with minimal development, but you still need decent characterization. If you randomly kill a hunded strangers in a story, the reader won't blink.

If there is no development of the principal characters, or at least one principal character, in a story, then the story is less likely to succeed.

You may have background characters who are not so much real characters as they are part of the setting. The line boy at the FBO, for example, who was told to top off the reserve and forgot. There is no need to develop him. He played his bit part and can be dismissed as a passing bit of scenery.

This single scene shows neither development nor lack thereof, just as a single vidcap from a 90 minute movie shows one moment in time but gives us little information about what came before or what will come after. Development takes place over time, and we need to see more to judge, first, if there is development of the character, and, second, whether the story succeeds if there is no development.

I should have explained. As it was not possible to dream up and post an entire story, I used the clip as an example of a story that moves from A to B without much help from the characters.

Some people say they want to feel something for the characters, I on the other hand ask why are the characters so important?

Why cannot readers be entertained with stories about wheels falling off or bridges collapsing or swimming pools leaking, where the wheels or bridges or pools are the main elements, and that show clinical detachment on the part of the characters as they solve those problems?

Because fiction is, to me, about the human condition, and it's hard to explore the human condition without character development.

Plot and setting and theme can engage the reader intellectually, but I think characters are the only parts of a story that readers connect with emotionally, which is generally the connection that matters.

My guess is it's something about human nature and being inherintly interested in people.
I think a story where the characters don't develop and the intention is not to make the reader care about them, would be very hard to make a success.
On some level most readers would probably get bored, whether they know why or not, but if they don't care about who it happens to, then they're not really going to care what happens next, and thusly the pages stop getting turned.

Here's what I believe:

William Faulkner: Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech

This says it far better than I ever could.

That was just words.